Abstract

The fact that we can engage in first-person discourse about our own mental states seems, intuitively, to be bound up with consciousness. David Rosenthal draws upon this intuition in arguing for his higher-order thought theory of consciousness. Rosenthalâ��s argument relies upon the assumption that the truth-conditions for â��pâ�� and â��I think that pâ�� differ. It is argued here that the truth-conditional schema debars â��I thinkâ�� from playing one of its (expressive) roles and thus is not a good test for what is asserted when â��I thinkâ�� is employed in making an assertoric utterance. The critique of Rosenthalâ��s argument allows us to make explicit the intuitions which shape higher-order representation theories of consciousness in general. Consciousness and first-person mental discourse seem to be connected primarily because consciousness is (and was) an epistemic term, used to denote first-person knowledge of minds. Higher-order thought theories of consciousness draw upon this epistemic notion of consciousness, and because self-knowledge seems to involve higher-order representation, the higher-order theorist can deploy what is in effect an â��error theoryâ�� about conscious experience disguised as a kind of conceptual analysis of our ordinary concept of a conscious mental state. The conclusion reached is that there is unlikely to be a simple or direct path from considerations about mental discourse to conclusions about the nature of consciousness.